See, I don't see that as a drawback. There's no shortage of talent online, but my feelings for different artists' work (especially with fanfic) are not interchangeable. Every time I go into a fandom and try to take stock of who's where and what they do well, I develop a sense for "oh, this is my go-to person for [very specific thing that's only sort of related to what I knew I wanted before I read their work]." That's as unique as a fingerprint, maybe more so. And that's not something I tend to call attention to, because I don't want them to get self-conscious or uncomfortable with showing this aspect of their personality and not some other one, and because a lot of people are just terrified these days of being one-of-a-kind and memorable online. But big fandom or small, I've never had trouble keeping track of authors just because they're all talented.
And it's such a relief to be able to interact with all that in a medium where no one can force them to only write what a publisher would feel comfortable trying to profit from! It's almost hard to remember what the world looked like before the internet took everything by storm, but I remember back then hearing educated people argue that creative writing was an extremely rare talent and if you thought otherwise you were probably one of those contemptible, deluded wanna-be's who thought their writing was good when actually no one but you would want to read it. They would assert that comedy took a special kind of genius, and normal human beings were incapable of being witty day after week after year - unlike the very special people who were already identified by the industry and being paid to make people laugh on television and in film. And, of course, that scriptwriting and film making were basically dark arts. That kind of talk went on and on and on. The default position was "stay in your place, consumer, even thinking you could do as well as the people who are PAID to make what you watch and read and listen to is horribly arrogant of you." And it is a long-term source of joy for me that the internet discredited that so resoundingly.
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See, I don't see that as a drawback. There's no shortage of talent online, but my feelings for different artists' work (especially with fanfic) are not interchangeable. Every time I go into a fandom and try to take stock of who's where and what they do well, I develop a sense for "oh, this is my go-to person for [very specific thing that's only sort of related to what I knew I wanted before I read their work]." That's as unique as a fingerprint, maybe more so. And that's not something I tend to call attention to, because I don't want them to get self-conscious or uncomfortable with showing this aspect of their personality and not some other one, and because a lot of people are just terrified these days of being one-of-a-kind and memorable online. But big fandom or small, I've never had trouble keeping track of authors just because they're all talented.
And it's such a relief to be able to interact with all that in a medium where no one can force them to only write what a publisher would feel comfortable trying to profit from! It's almost hard to remember what the world looked like before the internet took everything by storm, but I remember back then hearing educated people argue that creative writing was an extremely rare talent and if you thought otherwise you were probably one of those contemptible, deluded wanna-be's who thought their writing was good when actually no one but you would want to read it. They would assert that comedy took a special kind of genius, and normal human beings were incapable of being witty day after week after year - unlike the very special people who were already identified by the industry and being paid to make people laugh on television and in film. And, of course, that scriptwriting and film making were basically dark arts. That kind of talk went on and on and on. The default position was "stay in your place, consumer, even thinking you could do as well as the people who are PAID to make what you watch and read and listen to is horribly arrogant of you." And it is a long-term source of joy for me that the internet discredited that so resoundingly.